Obama data director: 'I am not Big Brother'

12/6/12 11:41 AM EST

The data director of President Obama's reelection campaign took to the opinion pages of the New York Times to call accusations that the campaign overstepped its bounds on privacy "malarkey."

"You may chafe at how much the online world knows about you, but campaigns don’t know anything more about your online behavior than any retailer, news outlet or savvy blogger," Ethan Roeder wrote in an op-ed entitled "I am not Big Brother."

The Obama campaign earned major plaudits from even rival Republican campaigns over their use of data and microtargeting — but the campaign adamantly refused to publicly discuss any aspect of their efforts until after the campaign's conclusion.

"There is no giant blue computer sitting on the 101st floor of a sleek skyscraper, surrounded by bubbling tubes of illuminated liquid, spitting out the manifest destiny of America’s voters," he wrote.

Roeder said that the campaign's micro-targeting strategy is not "sorcery" but rather the result of simple online marketing techniques used by hundreds of corporations and businesses.

Further, he writes, the campaign's voter files contain only public information like date of birth and voter registration.

"Want to know the year of birth for everyone who is registered to vote in Ohio? Just Google 'Ohio voter file download.' There you go. I was born in 1976. Now we’re even," wrote Roeder.

Roeder said that the only big change is the computing power allows campaigns to look for trends.

"What’s really new in politics today is not the data itself but how campaigns make sense of it. Cheaper and more plentiful computing power allows campaigns to process far more information than ever before to look for patterns, trends and correlations," Roeder said.